Photo-Secession:
Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography
“Why, Mr. Stieglitz, you won’t insist that a photograph can possibly be a work of art – you are a fanatic!”
-- Metropolitan Museum Director Luigi Palma de Cesnola to Alfred Stieglitz, 1902
Clarence H. White, The Mirror, 1912
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918
Gertrude Käsebier, Untitled (Billiard game) Circa 1910
Felix Thiollier, Paysage de Bugey, ca. 1885
Peter Henry Emerson, Gathering Water Lilies, 1885
Paul Strand, Speckled Toadstool, Georgetown, Maine, 1927
Karl Struss, Flatiron Building, Twilight, ca. 1915
Heinrich Kühn, Still Life with Fruit and Pottery late 1890s
Charles Sheeler, Side of White Barn, 1917
Heinrich Kühn, Female torso in sunlight, ca. 1920
Edward J.Steichen, Blossom of White Fingers, ca. 1923
Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907
Anne Brigman, The Pine Sprite, 1911
This exhibit celebrates an intrepid group of photographers on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the 20th century who fought to establish photography as a fully-fledged fine art, coequal with painting, sculpture, and etching. Their leader was Alfred Stieglitz, whose exhibition space, the “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession,” and exquisitely printed magazine, Camera Work, advanced the vision of the most ambitious artist-photographers, including Heinrich Kühn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, and Clarence White, as well as Stieglitz himself.
While they had their individual approaches to picture-making, these all involved the marriage of traditional painting subject matter – landscape, allegorical study, nude, still life – to a suitably hand-crafted photographic print. This combination of painterly imagery and print-making is known as Pictorialist photography.
The 78 works in this exhibit, drawn from a private collection, include prime examples of a variety of photographic printing techniques employed by the Pictorialists, such as platinum, gum-bichromate, carbon, cyanotype, and bromoil prints.The exhibit also covers the explosive aftermath of the Photo-Secession, when, starting with the work of Paul Strand in 1915-16, photography transitioned uneasily from Pictorialism to Modernism. Some photographers, clustered around Clarence White, continued to make painterly photographs. Others, particularly Steichen and Strand, adopted “straight” photography and developed the Modernist idiom.
Number of photographs: 78
Rental fee: $18,500 for eight weeks plus shipping and insurance. Additional weeks are 10 percent per week.